The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane won the Kate Greenaway Medal in 2019.

The Lost Words is a beautiful book with really sumptuous illustrations by Jackie Morris. It’s described as being a spellbook to conjure back the lost words of childhood, words that have been lost like acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conker. Words that just don’t appear in the vocabulary of many children because their lives have become so urbanised and constricted.

The book begins with acorn and ends with wren, with each letter of the alphabet being accompanied by a lovely descriptive acrostic poem. I have no idea why X and Y were left out.

It’s difficult to say which age group this book is aimed at. It’s very large at 15 inches by 11 (38cm by 28) and as it is printed in very high quality therefore thick heavy paper, it’s quite unwieldy even for an adult to hold. I borrowed it from the library and I was the first person to borrow it as because of its size it had been put into the nursery age boxes, but it’s not really the sort of book that very young children would choose. I think it should really be catalogued under Literature or even Art.

I believe that Robert Macfarlane was inspired to write this book because of the news that words that named natural things such as acorns, bramble, conker and wren were being removed from a children’s dictionary as they were no longer used by most children who nowadays wouldn’t know what they are apparently. I suppose it very much depends where the children live but I know that children’s nurseries in Edinburgh have forest lessons, probably the most popular time of the week for the kids. In any case, surely dictionaries are for looking up the words that you don’t know the meaning of, there’s no way of doing that if the words aren’t in the dictionary! I suppose now people just google everything.

This book costs £20 but it’s a work of art. Some of the profits from the book go to a charity called Action for Conservation.

There’s a flip through of the book on You Tube, it gives you an idea of what is in it but the illustrations are so detailed, you really want to look at them much more closely. The magpies are particularly majestic.

https://youtu.be/uOi1e4ORPQw?si=Aez67e6QQY62K1an